Rocker Jimi Hendrix’s family home, where his love of music blossomed as a child when it stood in Seattle, is now gone from the Highlands.
Crews finished taking down the house midweek. On Wednesday, what was left was a pile of planks and a foundation on which it had stood since November 2005.
Crews expect to have the house totally removed Thursday or early Friday, with final cleanup this weekend. A UHaul truck was in front of the nearly gone house Thursday to take the pieces of the house to a warehouse.
At least one worker had mixed feelings. “I grew up on Jimi Hendrix,” said one.
The end comes after the latest 11th-hour attempt to save Hendrix’s childhood home was unsuccessful. City officials held fast to last Friday’s removal deadline, and Pete Sikov began dismantling the shabby house he owns on Northeast Fourth Street late last week.
“Unfortunately, this is where we thought we might wind up,” said Neil Watts, the city’s director of development services.
From the city’s standpoint, Watts said he’s pleased Sikov honored his commitment to remove the house.
From a personal standpoint, there was a tinge of sadness.
“It just felt kind of sad that it didn’t work out,” said Watts. Sikov had invested time, money and effort into trying to fulfill his vision of a Hendrix museum and retail center, while the city devoted its time and effort to helping make that happen, he said.
Sikov had signed an agreement allowing the city to use $5,000 of his money to bulldoze the house if he did not remove it by Friday, March 27.
However, as long as Sikov was making “reasonable progress” to remove the house, the city wasn’t going to unleash the bulldozers right away, he said.
City officials ordered the two-bedroom house removed by March 27 after Sikov repeatedly failed to meet development deadlines. Sikov moved the house from Seattle to his Renton mobile-home park in 2005. Hi-Land Mobile Manor is just across the street from Hendrix’s grave in Greenwood Memorial Park.
The temporary-use permit allowing the house to remain in Hi-Land Mobile Manor expired in February 2008.
“We’ve been doing this a while,” Watts said.
So has Sikov. He has spent more than $150,000 on the Hendrix house. He bought the house in 2001 and moved it twice — first only a few blocks from its original Seattle spot and then to his newly purchased Hi-Land Mobile Manor.
He planned to turn the two-bedroom into a museum, showing visitors what the house looked like during the few years in the 1950s when Jimi, his brother Leon and his father Al lived there.
But plans for the house soon ballooned beyond manageable proportions. Sikov was working with a local development company to turn the house into a museum surrounded by townhouses and Hendrix-themed shops. That deal fell through. He then landed a potential buyer for the house and mobile-home park. But that deal also fell through.
Several Hendrix fans have offered their assistance to Sikov, including a local house-moving company.
Then, another Hendrix fan made a last-minute effort to save the house.
Film producer Michael Mycon of Camano Island said he was “positive” the city would approve his proposition to turn the house into an office for Sikov’s mobile-home park — and maybe a coffee shop and Jimi Hendrix information and retail center.
Mycon once delivered newspapers to Al Hendrix’s Seattle house. He’s been manager for Leon Hendrix, and he said the pair formed Original Hendrix LLC. He says he was behind the initial effort to bring the Hendrix house to Renton.
City officials rejected his idea. Watts said it would simply cost too much and take too much effort to turn that “shell of a house” into an information center — even a structure as simple as an office.
The transformation would require a new permit, plus a slew of structural upgrades, including the addition of insulation, fire protection, sprinklers, plumbing and electricity.
And the house would still be fronting an unattractive mobile-home park.
“We would hesitate to support that much investment in it when we don’t know how it fits into a future development,” Watts said.
He said city officials also wanted to be consistent in their treatment of illegal buildings, especially a house on such a “prominent arterial.”
“The final piece was, OK, so we’ve been doing this since 2005. It’s time to do something different,” Watts said.
And so Sikov and his workers are dismantling Hendrix’s house, piece by piece.
He’ll put those pieces in storage with the pieces he’s already removed from the house: the original kitchen cabinets, the clawfoot bathtub, the original window from Hendrix’s room, the original back door to the house leading into the kitchen, and, Sikov wrote in an e-mail to city officials, “literally a ton of other pieces, all carefully labeled.”
Sikov has said it’s “theoretically possible” but “very unlikely” that the house could be reassembled. He also said he doesn’t “necessarily anticipate” that the pieces will go into a museum.
Watts is more optimistic about the Hendrix house’s resurrection.
“Hopefully it’s not the end,” he said. “Its the end of it being stored in the fashion it’s stored, but we’re still interested in redeveloping that site. We’re still interested in the possibility of that structure being incorporated into some development.”
CORRECTION
A Renton Reporter story published on Friday and appearing on RentonReporter.com reported that, according to Michael Mycon, the information and retail center he proposed for the Hendrix house would benefit the James Marshall Hendrix Foundation, run by Leon Hendrix.
However, the CEO of that foundation, James E. Williams, said Friday in response that Leon Hendrix is no longer involved with the foundation and that the proposed information center would not benefit the foundation, Mycon, a Hendrix fan, said that is “absolutely incorrect.” According to Mycon, a federal court judge in 2005 ruled that the foundation and any use of Jimi Hendrix’s likeness are under the control of Leon Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix’s brother.
READ THE FEDERAL COURT DECISION ON FOUNDATION
WHERE IS JIMI’S HOUSE?
The childhood home of Jimi Hendrix fronts the Hi-Land Mobile Manor at 3612 N.E. Fourth St.
